Oregon School Shooting at Silver Rail Elementary Results in Multiple Casualties
When the Law Arms a Child, It Breaks Its Trust
A government that lets minors bear lethal weapons into schools has ceased to protect life and has begun to play at force under the name of law.
A boy of sixteen walks into an elementary school in Oregon with a firearm, and children and a teacher lie dead. I read also of a man, a father, who rushed in to stop the attack, and of teachers who fought to shield their pupils. These are acts of courage; but that such courage is needed within a place of learning tells us something has gone wrong in the first principles of your polity. For courage is the remedy when law has failed, and when danger that ought never to have been permitted has already breached the doors.
Among the facts reported, one stops the understanding short. The law, I am told, permits those under eighteen to have access to a gun if a parent or guardian has given permission. Here the mind must dwell a moment. A child, not yet admitted to full civil standing in countless other respects, may, by a private license within the family, be armed with an instrument whose whole design is the quick destruction of life. If my definition of political power in the “Second Treatise of Government” was sound—authority ordered to the preservation of lives, liberties, and estates—then such a rule stands in need of a very strong justification, or it condemns itself.
The law of nature, which I have elsewhere identified with reason itself, teaches all who will attend to it that, being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions. Civil laws are trusted only because they are thought a surer guard of that property, in this broad sense, than each man’s private strength. When a rule foreseeably exposes young children in their school to the deadly choices of an armed minor, it ceases to be a fence and becomes a breach. It may be clothed in regular forms, yet in substance it allies itself with force against the innocent.
Here some will object that the fault lies in the individual shooter, not in the frame of the law; that millions of households may permit access without bloodshed, and we must not confound abuse with use. I grant that every crime is, first, the deed of a particular will. Yet legislators know, or ought to know, the frailty and passion of men, and most of all of the young, who are not yet steady in reason. If one fashions a rule that predictably multiplies occasions where sudden anger, despair, or folly are armed at once with deadly means, one shares in the causation of the harms that follow.
The point is sharper when we consider the standing of the child. Your own practices show that those under eighteen are not treated as fully capable of disposing of contracts, estates, and other weighty matters. They are, in many things, wards under the care of parents and of the commonwealth. To put so great a power of life and death into such hands, on the mere say-so of a parent, is to let private discretion overrule the public’s first duty, which is the safety of all. The parent is then, in effect, made judge in his own case, while the neighbours’ children pay the forfeit.
Yet I do not say that one such massacre by itself dissolves governments and sends men back into a state of nature. The dissolution of a government, as I wrote before, comes only after a long train of abuses, all pointing one way, to the subversion of the people’s security and freedom. Fear of disorder is no argument for bearing chains, but neither is every tragic mischief a warrant for pulling down all authority. What it does warrant is a searching inquiry whether the legislative has been faithful to its trust, and a firm demand that it amend, where reason shows it has failed.
If, knowing now that a sixteen-year-old, legally armed by parental permission, could enter a school and kill children and their teacher, legislators still choose to preserve the very rule that enabled it, preferring a speculative notion of liberty in arms over the concrete lives of pupils and masters, then they do more than err. They set themselves, by persisting, against the very end for which they were entrusted with power. In that case, resistance begins not in tumult, but in the settled refusal of the people to assent to a law that abandons their lives to chance; for when the law arms a child and leaves his schoolmates undefended, it has forgotten that they too are the workmanship of one Maker, sent into the world not to be targets, but to live.
From the works cited
- Second Treatise of Government — Political power defined narrowly as the right to make laws, with penalties, only for the public good — anything beyond that definition must justify itself or stand condemned.
- Second Treatise of Government — The law of nature as analytic baseline: perfect freedom and equality under the law of nature, so that government must be shown to improve on that baseline for everyone who leaves it.